Dolores Ibárruri Goméz

“A married woman was a domestic
slave with no rights. At home, the wife lost her personality; she devoted
herself, out of desperate need, to a life of sacrifice. She put up with the
weight of her work and deprivation, looking for any means possible to make the
life of her children and her husband more pleasant, easier, less difficult, to
the point that she herself was wiped out, eventually becoming “the old lady”
who “doesn’t understand”, who is always in the middle, who, in the best of
cases, is a servant for the children, a child-minder for the grandchildren”.

Memorias de Dolores Ibárruri:
Pasionaria: La lucha y la vida

(Dolores
Ibárruri’s Memoirs: Pasionaria: The struggle and life)

Biography

A Spanish communist
leader, she was born in Gallarta, a town in the Biscay region of the Basque
Country in 1895. The granddaughter, daughter, wife and sister of miners, from a
very young age she was familiar with the hardships of a working home. Her
transformation from a simple village woman into a revolutionary and communist militant
took place slowly, and was a reaction to the subhuman situation in which mining
families lived and the influence of the religious education received in schools
and families.

Chronology

1909-1910: She began her preparatory studies to enter the teacher
training college and undertake her studies. Later, she was forced to drop out
of her studies to work as a seamstress and servant.

1917: She became interested in the workers’ struggle and joined the protests
for mining men and families in the general strike that year. Soon she joined
the socialist group in Somorrostro.

1918-1920:
She married the communist leader Julián
Ruiz, with whom she had 6 children. An avid reader, she became familiar with
Marxist literature and further developed her knowledge of socialism. That same
year, she published her first article in the magazine “Minero Vizcaíno”
and signed it with the pseudonym La Pasionaria. Later, in 1920, she was
elected a member of the first Provincial Committee of the Vizcaya Communist
Party.

1928-1931: She attended the III Conference of the Spanish
Communist Party (PCE- Partido Comunista Español) as a delegate. At the
end of 1931, the party´s management decided she should move to Madrid, to work as
editor of the main Communist Party newspaper, Mundo Obrero. One day, as
she left the newspaper buildings, she was arrested and brought from the
Quiñones prison to the Larrínaga prison in Bilbao. No one took a statement from
her, or explained the reasons for her arrest. In future years, due to her
active political affiliation in communist protests and her pointed speeches,
she was often imprisoned and persecuted by the authorities.

1932-1934:
During the IV Conference of the Spanish Communist Party she was elected head of
the Female Committee of the Party. In August 1934, a Spanish delegation led by
Dolores Ibárruri and other women such as Carmen Loyola, Encarnación Fuyola,
Irene Falcón and Elisa Uriz, attended the First Worldwide Meeting of Women
against War and Fascism, held in Paris. The Anti-fascist Women’s Organisation played
an important role in the training of female political activists who fought for
the Republic and against the fascist military oppression of that time. At the
end of that year, when repression was becoming widespread among workers in
Asturias, she travelled with Ms Isabel de Albacete and Ms Alicia García, to
help families who had fallen victim to the repression in Asturias.

1935: She was elected as part of a delegation of the Spanish Communist
Party, to attend the VII Conference of the Communist International in Moscow. Upon
her return, she was imprisoned again due to her political participation. Her
concern regarding the constant arrests was one of the reasons why she decided
to send her children to study in Russia.

1937: That year she was elected Vice-president of the Parliament and had
an important role on account of her activity against the regime of the time.
Some of her famous phrases supporting the republican cause are from this
period. It was there, at that time, that her phrase “Antes morir de pie que
vivir de rodillas” (Better to die standing up than to live kneeling down) was
made famous, as well as her motto “No pasarán!” (They shall not pass), which
was coined during the Siege of Madrid.

1939-1942: During the war she was promoted to the second position of influence
in the party, after the General Secretary, José Díaz. That year, she
coordinated the emigration of Spanish people to the USSR, where she was sent
and where she would lose her only son Rubén Ruiz Ibárruri during the combats in
the central rail station of Stalingrad. In 1942 she became the General Secretary
of the PCE and moved to Paris. A decade later, Dolores was sent to
Czechoslovakia where she broadcasted Radio España Independiente.

1960-1961: She wrote her memoires entitled El único camino (The only
way) and later, Memorias de Pasionaria (1939-1977) (Pasionaria’s
memoires).In the
Soviet Union, she was awarded an honorary doctorate in history by the
University of Moscow. In her acceptance speech she said: “…I accept this as a homage to our country labourers,
to our women, to our working youth, who barely knew the first letters, and
through no fault of their own, knew, however, how to write with their blood and
their life, immortal pages of glory and heroism in the different stages of our
country’s troubled history”.

1964-1965:
Dolores received the Lenin Peace Prize, and later, the Order of Lenin.

1977:
During the transition to democracy in Spain, and after the death of General
Franco, Dolores returned to Spain. She arrived in Madrid on 13 May 1977, after
38 years in exile. She was once again elected as a member of parliament for
Asturias in the first democratic elections in Spain.

1983:
Near the end of her life, she participated in the protests of mothers in the
Plaza de Mayo, in Argentina, demanding the dictatorship to return their
disappeared relatives alive.

1989:
The Pasionaria never abandoned her revolutionary activity. She died in Madrid
that year, at the age of ninety four. She was buried in the civil grounds of
the Almudena Cemetery.

During
the XVII Conference of the Communist Party, held in June 2005, Dolores Ibárruri
was elected “Perpetual Honorary President”.